Column: The story of Jackson's link to Supreme Court

Brad Flory
Without taking sides, the historic-preservation dispute over an old house at 744 W. Michigan Ave. warrants a story.

It's the story of Jackson's link to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The late Potter Stewart, an associate justice on the Supreme Court from 1958 to 1981, was born in Jackson on Jan. 23, 1915, but the official version of events always minimized him as an accidental native.

Recent scholarship suggests the official version needs revision.

Stewart's mother, in his own words, was "kind of a small-town rich girl" from Jackson.

Born Harriet Loomis Potter, she was the daughter and granddaughter of the Potter men who ran City Bank & Trust. She moved to Cincinnati after marrying a lawyer named James Garfield Stewart, and it was not a happy union.

Her husband, dubbed "Jovial Jim" Stewart, entered Cincinnati politics in the 1930s and became a beloved public figure who put politics ahead of time with his family.

Harriet filed for divorce in 1936, accusing him of "complete indifference." Potter Stewart once described his father as "a stranger."

The official version of events says Potter Stewart was born in Jackson because his mother visited her family at Christmas, then was told not to travel back to Cincinnati before delivering the baby.

Doubt about that explanation is expressed in a 2002 Akron Law Review article by Joel Jacobsen, then assistant attorney general in New Mexico.

Jacobsen suspects Harriet Stewart chose to have her baby in Jackson, but "Jovial Jim" later made it sound accidental when explaining it to Cincinnati newspapers.

"It seems odd that his mother should have taken a vacation when her pregnancy was so far advanced, particularly as she already had a young daughter to take care of," wrote Jacobsen.

"Possibly it seemed impolitic to admit that she preferred the care she could receive in her hometown to that available in Cincinnati."

And possibly Harriet Stewart came to Jackson for family support if "indifference" was a problem in her marriage.

In any case, her baby was named for the Potter family and grew up as no stranger to Jackson.

"So long as my grandfather was alive, we came back to Jackson and went out to Clark Lake every summer," Stewart recalled. "I remember very happy summers there."

And that's how a U.S. Supreme Court justice came to be born in a Potter family home located, according to decades of Citizen Patriot reporting, at 744 W. Michigan Ave.